I am new to this, I am not learning to write, but I am learning to speak & I can speak much better looking at Romaji. That is hard enough right now I do not want to overload & give up learning because there are too many ways to write things I can not read. Im am learning to speak only so Romaji is needed at this time. It is how I choose to learn it because it is much much easier to understand. Can I please get the Romaji?

While it's not bad advice to say that you should learn how to read the kana (hiragana and katakana) as soon as possible, I'll be nice and help you out for now.

フレンドリクエストをおくってください。
furendo rikuesuto o okutte kudasai.

(I don't know if that's the best way to say it... just trusting Shiroisan on that.)

Most serious textbooks will either assume you already know the kana at the very least, or will expect you to know all the kana by the end of the 2nd chapter or so. Working on them should let you have them down in short order (a week or a couple weeks if you learn a few a day, depending on how many you tackle and how much you practice them).

One thing to keep in mind is that it can actually be a BAD thing to use romaji, because it tricks your mind into thinking about reading the word in your native way of speaking... so if you see "arigatou", you might use the "r" sound of English, rather than the half way between r and l sound that it is, with it's own very particular kind of pronunciation. Reading things in kana helps to switch your mind into reading it "in Japanese" so to speak, with the proper pronunciation.

The sooner you start doing this, the better off you are, and the more the world of learning Japanese will open up to you.

Not that I disagree with what Phreadom says, and I particularly agree that you are cutting yourself off from good learning resources by not learning the kana.

I think the -most- important reason not to use roomaji (which has a long 'o' by the way) is that it loses pronunciation information the way it's usually used. It is possible, of course, to devise a system where it doesn't, but the way it's usually used,

たんい たに are both tani, but they are not pronounced the same
たんに たっに are both tanni, but are not pronounced the same

The っに is rare, because it doesn't actually occur in words, but you might get an exclamation that ends in っ and is followed by the particle に.

Sometimes people use n' for ん to avoid this, but it can't be counted on because, well, roomaji isn't standardized (or, more accurately, has multiple, conflicting standards.)

I think there may be another category of lost information besides ん, but I can't remember one at the moment.

There are certainly a bunch of other issues around 'ha' or 'wa', 'wo' or 'o', 'toukyou' or ' tookyoo', 'ro-maji' or 'roomaji', etc., although that sort of thing is more an example of wasted effort - things you have to learn about to read roomaji but that are useless once you do learn the kana.

Also, of course, roomaji gives other learners headaches and makes them disinclined to be helpful when you ask questions. No, really... reading roomaji is difficult and awkward when you're used to reading normal Japanese. Of course it's -possible- but it can take a long time to decode.

But I think it just goes to show yet another reason why it's better to just learn the kana and write in the kana.

"roomaji" looks like it should be read like "room" (as in a room in a house)
"rōmaji" with the macron is voodoo magic level difficult for regular English speakers (since we can't type that by default on our keyboards)
"roumaji" isn't really correct, since it basically shows the wrong "spelling"...
and "ro-maji" still fails to show the long "o" sound because the long sound mark is never used in romanization because it just looks like a normal dash etc.

Of course on the other hand, if we write ローマ字 or ローマじ (if we're sticking to kana only)... they clearly show the "ro", "long sound mark", "ma", and "ji"... so you know exactly how to say it.

phreadom wrote:One thing to keep in mind is that it can actually be a BAD thing to use romaji, because it tricks your mind into thinking about reading the word in your native way of speaking... so if you see "arigatou", you might use the "r" sound of English, rather than the half way between r and l sound that it is, with it's own very particular kind of pronunciation. Reading things in kana helps to switch your mind into reading it "in Japanese" so to speak, with the proper pronunciation.

While I do advocate learning kana ASAP (partly because you'll have to anyway, partly because so many learning materials use it), I'm always baffled by the ubiquitous claim that using romaji will ruin your pronunciation. I'm learning three foreign languages (Spanish, Italian, and Latin) that use the Latin alphabet and I virtually never make pronunciation mistakes in them just because they're written in the same alphabet as English. My pronunciation is still not perfect, but I don't think the writing system is to blame. In fact, of all the languages I study, my Japanese probably has the lousiest pronunciation -- and I've been studying with kana only from the beginning.

If there's any correlation between people learning Japanese with romaji and people with sucky pronunciation, it's probably because both are symptomatic of laziness in general.

While I recognize the parallel with European languages all using the same alphabet and almost wrote something about that... I think that using romanized Japanese does mean overcoming pronunciation habits when facing the more non-intuitive spellings, and worse than that, a difficulty with understanding mora timing because the number of letters in a mora can vary while the number of kana in a mora is always 1.

It's not that these problems can't be overcome with time, practice, and effort... it's that it's totally useless and wasted time, practice and effort in the long run. Being able to fluently read roomaji is a totally useless skill (unless, perhaps, you are tutoring people too lazy to learn the kana). The time, practice, and effort required to correctly pronounce japanese is far more than what it takes to learn the kana ; the time, practice, and effort required to correctly re-associate the roman characters to the correct sounds is probably more than it takes to learn the kana, since you're starting with a blank slate on new symbols and not overcoming ingrained habits.

(That may, perhaps, be different if you're already multi-lingual and used to overloading the roman alphabet with multiple pronunciation systems, but I don't know any such person - all the polyglots seem to simply take two or three days and learn the kana first. It took me a week to learn each kana syllabary when I first started, but I guess those with practice learning languages take to it faster.)

@furry, I can guarantee that romaji can greatly effect you negatively INCLUDING pronounciation. In theory, you're right, it shouldn't- so why am I saying it does? Because half the time romaji is written using the wrong letters.

Because genki used romaji in the first few chapters of their volume, for a YEAR (a freaking year!) I thought that words like international relations were pronounced (and written) as こくさいかんけえ, because they freaking wrote it as "kokusai kankee" in romaji. I was SO pissed considering that was straight from the textbook... At first I couldn't even tell whether or not they were wanting me to make a きい sound.

So, in my opinion, romaji might not be so devastating if it was standardized and written the exact same way in the English speaking world, but it simply isn't. Some choose to write the words exactly like their kana counterparts, but others choose to mess with things。 You'd be surprised how badly they can f*** a word up.
But even if it WAS standardized correctly (which it isn't), there STILL would be no point in using it as you're isolating yourself from all materials and communities before even trying to say ありがとう。

Not to mention... If you don't have the confidence to try and learn 48 (including dakuten and handakuten) simple, 2- stroke characters that can only be read one way, how would you ever hope to learn a single kanji? Just saying..

Shiroisan wrote:Because genki used romaji in the first few chapters of their volume, for a YEAR (a freaking year!) I thought that words like international relations were pronounced (and written) as こくさいかんけえ

Written, no, but pronounced, yes. If you pronounce えい as a diphthong, you're doing it wrong. So how is this ruining one's pronunciation?

Sounds to me that romaji is actually producing better pronunciation in this instance

EDIT: I have been informed that my assertion is a little too strong and there are many native speakers who do pronounce えい differently. Still, pronouncing them identically is certainly not wrong.

Last edited by furrykef on Sat 05.05.2012 2:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

e + i in the japanese syllabary basically makes an "A" sound. e + e makes the "Meh" sound extended. Maybe my ears are just sensitive, but the two sound completely different to me. Genki wrote it as "kokusai kankee".